Research Facilities

Research in the Centre for Biodiversity and Sustainability draws on a wide range of outdoor and indoor lab facilities and the Apocrita supercomputer cluster.

The River Laboratory

The Centre benefit from having a team based at the River Laboratory, a purpose-built laboratory on the banks of an iconic SSSI chalk stream in Dorset. As well as direct access to the river to study these globally important ecosystems, the site boasts large-scale experimental facilities; pond mesocsoms including the longest running experiment investigating the effect of global warming on freshwaters, a set of 12 replicated experimental streams and in-stream equipment for monitoring fish behaviour.

The Genomics Facility

Each of the research themes benefits from this facility, in which dedicated staff provides expertise and access to state-of-the-art equipment to automate the processing of large numbers of samples to read the DNA genetic codes and RNA messages. The Facility’s expertise in handling previously unstudied species has revealed how they respond to changes in the environment such as increased temperature or the arrival of invasive species. The processing of the huge datasets is supported by the Apocrita computer cluster which has been modified to allow the heavy-duty bioinformatics and downstream data analysis.